<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/loose.dtd">
<html>
<head>
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=UTF-8">
<title>OpenDDS Modeling SDK Help Content Authoring Guide</title>
</head>
<body>

<h1>OpenDDS Modeling SDK Help Content Authoring Guide</h1>

<h2>Tools</h2>

<h3>Editing HTML files within Eclipse</h3>

<p>There is a plug-in available for editing HTML files called Web Page Editor. For Eclipse 3.5 Galileo, to install the Eclipse Web Page Editor
Go to "Help" > "Install New Software" Choose to work with the site <br>
</br>http://download.eclipse.org/releases/galileo<br>
Expand "Web, XML and Java EE development", Check "Web Page Editor" and click Next to continue with the install.</p>

<h4>Some notes about Web Page Editor</h4>
<ul>
<li>It does syntax highlighting and content assist.</li>
<li>Its formatter seems to flattens any indentation!</li>
<li>Image files can be dragged to end of the "src=" portion of an img tag. However, the path is relative to project root and not to the HTML file.</li>
</ul>

<h3>Screen shots</h3>

<h4>Linux systems</h4>

<p>If you're taking numerous screen shots under Linux consider the tool <a href="http://shutter-project.org">Shutter</a>. It has a built-in
editor that allows for operations like cropping, highlighting, and drawing ovals and rectangles to focus on a portion of the screen shot.</p>

<h3>HTML indentation</h3>

<p>A tool like <a href="http://tidy.sourceforge.net/">Tidy</a> can be used to indent HTML.</p>

<h3>Checking links</h3>

<p>The command line tool <a href="http://linkchecker.sourceforge.net/">linkchecker</a> can be used to verify that links in the HTML files are valid.</p>

<h2>Style Guide</h2>

<h3>Referring to menu items</h3>

<p>The style used in the official Eclipse help content is to put the menu path in bold and separate levels with a -&#62; (use HTML code &amp;#62 for &#62;).</p>
<h3>Embedding commands in help</h3>

<p>It is possible to embed Eclipse commands in your HTML pages. This can allow, for example, the user to click on a link to activate a menu item (if
there is a command associated with it) rather than just showing the menu item as static text. More information can be found in the Eclipse
Help contents under Platform Plug-in Developer Guide > Programmer's Guide > User assistance support > Help > Help content > Embedding commands in help.</p>

<p>One way to determine what commandIds are available is to plugins.xml extensions view and select a command then click on the browse button near
the commandId field. (Isn't there an easier way to do this?)</p>

<h3>Duplicating content from the OpenDDS Developer's Guide</h3>

<p>Some of the help content, such as the Policy definitions in the reference section, is based on HTML export from Framemaker. The exported stylesheet was
used and minimal changes were made
to the exported markup. Links that were invalid after breaking up the content into difference pages were fixed.</p>

</body>
</html>